Tag Archives: egg selling

San Ramon, CA/July 13, 2012—News is just breaking in India about Sushma Pandey, a 17-year-old young woman who died in 2010, two days after her third egg “donation.” Her death is being attributed to the procedures used to extract eggs from healthy, desirable young females like Ms. Pandey. These eggs are often resold to affluent westerners for use in commercial production of their children. Her post-mortem report states she had “one abrasion, four contusions and a blood clot in the head, plus six injection marks” as well as “congestion in the ovaries and uterus.” The possible cause of her death was listed as shock due to multiple injuries.

This most recent exposure of the daily exploitation of females offers yet another wake up call to the truth of the real, repeat, and often lethal harms of invasive egg removal procedures, which masquerade under the lie of donation. These transactions are anything but “donations” as young females — nearly children themselves — all over the world, desperately fall prey to offers of money like those made to Ms. Pandey.

Calls for regulation by physicians in India will do nothing to protect young women who seek to “donate” their eggs because they are in desperate need of money. Regulated exploitation is still exploitation — using young women as egg farms for affluent westerners wanting children.

Dr. Allahbadia, one of the drafters of a new Assisted Reproduction Technology Bill, wants to raise the minimum age for egg donors. But how does being older mitigate for the health risks of egg donation? It doesn’t.

Kathleen Sloan, feminist leader and human rights advocate who serves as a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC) comments:

“The list of known health dangers to women who provide their eggs is extensive. It includes Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome from the profusion of synthetic hormones and fertility drugs such as Lupron, estrogen (linked to breast and uterine cancers, heart attack, stroke, and blood clots), and progesterone they are injected with; ovarian torsion; and kidney disease — and those are just the short-term risks! How many more women will have to die before India and the United States, the two countries where the out of control fertility industry is allowed to endanger and exploit women unimpeded, take action? No country can claim to respect women’s human rights while simultaneously turning them into commodities subject to life-threatening harms.”

Jennifer Lahl, writer, producer, and director of the award-winning film Eggsploitaiton states,

“What happened to Sushma Pandey is happening to women every day, all over the world. The infertility industry knows the seriousness of the health risks, yet objects to any oversight, to long-term studies, and to regulation, simply because it will compromise their profits.”

In the world of commercialized conception, it seems we’ve decided the freezer is a great place to keep eggs, sperm, and “spare” embryos until we need them. We think they do pretty well in the freezer, but the verdict is still out on what happens over the long haul when you freeze and store human reproductive material and nascent human life. Commercial conceivers simply assume that because we can freeze and thaw our reproductive cells or progeny, it causes no harm or danger.

And not only can we do it; it has become big business.

Case in point: the new fad of egg freezing. It began with the laudable goal of helping the younger woman who was diagnosed with cancer. A woman facing cancer treatment is at risk for compromised fertility induced by chemotherapy. Egg freezing was used to try to preserve and protect her fertility, so that after her cancer treatment was completed and her health was restored, she might still be able to conceive — using in vitro fertilization — her own biological child. It is also used in veterinary medicine to preserve species, especially endangered species.

But this new egg-freezing industry has popped up more and more as a lifestyle choice. Maybe, baby later. National Public Radio devoted a segment to this fad titled, “Egg Freezing Puts the Biological Clock on Hold.” They reported, “As more women postpone motherhood into their 30s, even 40s, they’re hitting that age-old constraint: the biological clock. Now, technology is dangling the possibility that women can stop that clock, at least for a while.”

Even grandparents are getting into (and paying for) the act! The New York Times heralded, “So Eager for Grandchildren, They’re Paying the Egg-Freezing Clinic”! The story paints this picture, “The gray-haired entourages, it turns out, are the parents, tagging along to lend support — emotional and often financial — as their daughters turn to the fledgling field of egg freezing to improve their chances of having children later on, when they are ready to start a family.”

But of course, the facts seem to get lost in all the hoopla over a newfangled way to manipulate reproduction.

First, there is the pragmatic reality of the cost of this new experimental service. I called one egg freezing agency in Southern California, and the woman I spoke with was putting the hard sell on me. I explained I was only writing an article on this and wasn’t interested in this for myself! The costs are high – meaning if you are poor, don’t even think about freezing your eggs. It’s about $7,000 to $12,000 to harvest the eggs, and an additional $4,000 to $5,000 later to transfer the embryos into the woman’s uterus once she’s ready to have a baby. Then there are the fertility drugs to super ovulate the woman in order to maximize the number of eggs retrieve, adding an additional $2,700. Plus the annual storage fee of $300 to $600.

Then, there are the medical realities. Nowhere on any egg freezing sites that I visited did anyone disclose the realities of the risks to women and children related to maternal age and pregnancy. I’ve written before about the risks of advanced maternal age which heightens the risk of “fetal loss” – meaning age increases the likelihood that she won’t carry the baby to term.

There is an increasing risk of fetal loss with increasing maternal age in women aged more than 30 years. Fetal loss is high in women in their late 30s or older, irrespective of reproductive history. This should be taken into consideration in pregnancy planning and counseling.

Shouldn’t a technology that claims to be able to put the biological clock on hold be accountable for disclosing the maternal-child health risks to women?

And this is still experimental science. Even the sites that show their methods and success rates show that this is a field still learning about the best methods and techniques. Do women really, if properly informed, want to experiment on their future children? This graph demonstrates the wide range of “success” depending on the freezing method:

I say freezers are for food, like the Thanksgiving turkey, not for our future progeny.

Contact

Guest Columns

NewFeminism.co will publish an occasional guest column of no more than 750 words on a topic related to or from the perspective of New Feminism. There is no compensation. By submitting a column to NewFeminism.co you agree to publication at the website and to the standards of NewFeminism.co comment policies.